Visions and Of Him
by ej'snwsm
Summary: Cas looks at a sunset. The Winchester brothers look at Cas. What they see is the dichotomy of both themselves and Castiel.


The day was closing fast. Cas could feel the seconds ticking away as the road sped under the tires of the car. He was in the backseat, again, waiting impatiently for a chance to be useful. The brothers were in the front, alternating between childish bickering and deadly silence. Cas knew that most of their tension came from the case they were currently working. The urgency, the frenzy that came with the chance to save lives. It was something that he had come to expect. It caused his Winchesters to tie themselves in knots worrying about time running out.

Castiel glanced out of the window, at the horizon where darkness was clawing its way around the globe, inching closer. When night truly took hold they would be in trouble. They were speeding towards destinations unknown to Cas, Sam had turned to Dean dramatically and they had dragged Cas to the car without a further word of explanation. Cas was amazed by the amount of information that could be conveyed by a mere look. The subtle intricacies and nuances of facial expressions. Yet the Winchester method of nonverbal communication seemed to surpass the standard, almost like the exaggerated expressions of the people that Cas had watched on the television.

Underneath him, Castiel felt the car jolt to a stop. A few fragments of heated discussion flew between Dean and Sam, culminating in the former exiting the cabin of the vehicle, pursued by the latter, who slammed his door slightly harder than Cas deemed necessary.

Cas followed. By the time he rounded the car, the brothers were already engrossed in the perusal of what appeared to be a map. It seemed they were lost.

Cas scanned their surroundings. In the fading light, he could make out every detail of the harsh desert around them. They were standing upon a hill, facing down into a valley beyond which the sands stretched out like a lifeless metropolis. The plains were unbroken and seemingly endless, though Cas knew that they must hide their borders somewhere. Someplace where the sand gradually gave way to stone, to gravel, to dirt, and eventually to water. Deserts were not, could not be all that existed, despite what his limited vision was telling him.

All that punctuated the harsh backdrop was the occasional shrubbery and the flickers of the last rays of sunlight upon the dry earth. Castiel allowed his eyes to follow the playful dance of a particular beam of golden light, as it flirted with the growing shadow, in the valley below him. It's illusion of sentience, the way that it seemed to be alive, captivated him. Castiel admired this illusion, allowed it to overcome him until he almost identified the ray as a living thing, in its dying moments.

Behind him his companions continued talking, the thrill and importance of their hunt almost audible in the semi hushed tones.

Abruptly the beam faded from upon the sand. The sun, where it still held onto the ground behind Castiel, must have sunk further still, restricting its final effusions from the ground below his feet. Castiel could still feel the warmth from the sinking orb upon his back, and so he turned to face the sun. It was resplendent in its final moments, casting a vast array of colours out upon the gathered storm clouds. The furious tempests, writhing with deep hues of purple and blue, were shockingly outlined with burning gold. The blue sky was dyed blood red, the inky colours echoing out into the corners of the visible convexity.

Cas could feel the sunbeams alight upon his face, feel the soft fingertips of the dying sun caress his skin. As the air shifted around him, he could feel the last whispers of the wind, sighing goodbye to the day. That wasn't all that he heard, however. The rest of the night was noise. Castiel could hear the hum of the endless void that was quickly darkening above their heads, the rustle of the tiny grains beneath his feet. So often the mix of noises would be a deafening cacophony. But now, just for the moment, everything fell into an easy harmony, quiet and yet overpowering. Even the sunlight spoke through the vast spaces of the plains.

It was moments like these that let Castiel forget. Forget that it wasn't all impersonal hunts and being useful. Forget the things that he had done, and the things that he would have to do. Forget what he was looking for, and what he was trying to leave behind.

Castiel watched the sun depart, as it rose upon another day in some other place.

*

"How do you get lost when there's only one road?"

"I don't know Sammy, maybe I was relying on the navigator."

Sam sighed and went back to pouring over the map. Everything was a fight with Dean these days. Sam always felt his own anger rising a just the sound of Dean's voice. Something about his brother had always been able to grate on him. The way Sam saw it, there was nothing truly malignant about the animosity between them. They were both on edge during the hunt, and they took it out on each other. They'd been doing it as long as he could remember. When they barely had time for anything else, it was what they seemed to do to keep the edge off their insanity.

As Dean searched the map with him, Sam began to panic slightly. If they couldn't find where they should be going, before the sun rose again, lives could be at stake. Lives always seemed to be at stake. And they only had a handful of darkened hours left.

Sam glanced up and saw Castiel staring at the sunset. The intensity of his gaze caused Sam to instinctively do the same.

Sam couldn't see what was so spectacular about it. He couldn't even imagine all of the things that Cas had seen, visions above and beyond the scope of human conceptualization, surely a sunset would struggle to measure up. But the man was still staring out into the sky, seemingly enthralled by the sight.

Sam had grown used to Cas staring intensely at things that barely warranted a second look, so he started to turn away, when his eyes caught on something else.

Flickering in the air, meters away from Cas' body, were the tips of black feathers. They flitted sporadically in and out of existence as Sam watched, until he could hardly believe what he was seeing. Sam could sense the intense activity with which they moved, could only imagine the frenzy that they would present in their entirety. It wasn't the shadow wings that Dean had described, though they appeared and disappeared with the same lightning speed. They looked so real, slick and gleaming in the fading light, that Sam thought that he could probably reach out and touch them. Sam saw the oblivion on Cas' face and knew that the angel wasn't aware of what Sam could see. It was probably natural to him.

Sam looked over Cas' face with a new attention. The angel seemed to be soaking the power from the world around him, glowing radiantly in the beams of light. In that moment he almost embodied the young Sam's misguided conceptualization of angels, the beings that he had once entrusted with his inner most thoughts. Sam thought that he could see Cas' body vibrating with energy, and the air above and around him crackling with energy or waving with heat. Sam wasn't sure which.

Sam's eyes drank in the sight. The sheer power, unconfined by the angel's vessel, called to him like siren's song. Sam could feel it diffusing into him, into his cells, into his being at a sub-molecular level. The evidence of Cas' extra-terrestrial magnificence rattled Sam to his core. It was true, pure, barely contained power. Sam never forgot what Cas was, but he never really grasped what exactly that meant. The throwaway phrases, the nickname, the awkwardness, not to mention the angel's strange affiliation with his brother, had all served to superficially humanize the creature that stood before him.

But this _thing _was an angel and Sam thought that it was beautiful. Sam could almost hear the world buzzing around him as the angelic presence cocooned them within a cage of pure energy. This was Castiel, Angel of The Lord.

*

"Where did you say we were?" Dean demanded, dragging his index finger across some random line on this random map that was showing him, unsurprisingly, absolutely nothing.

When Sam didn't answer, Dean glanced up. Sam was gazing speechlessly at Castiel, who was glaring at the sunset as if it did him personal injury. Then again, Cas always looked like something had either gone very wrong, or exceeded the limits of his angelic understanding.

Dean was about to physically grab Sam and drag him back into the navigational/lets-find-out-where-we-are-so-we-can- get-back-to-our-very-important-job-of-saving-peopl e discussion, but something about his brother's expression stopped him. It was too intense, too enthralled and Dean glanced back at Cas, thinking that something must be wrong. There was always something wrong with something or other.

But Cas seemed fine. And there were no ominous signs out in the distance. The sun was setting, and in Dean's experience, all that meant was that it was going to get a little darker.

Dean's eyes lingered on Cas. His friend looked truly enchanted by the inky palate that the sky had become. In the dying light, the angel just looked tired. His dark hair was a mess, giving the illusion that Cas had just risen from a bed that Dean knew he had never fallen into. Cas deserved to be tired. Everything that they had gone through, the frantic of it all.

Dean knew that he was looking at something that could squash him in a second if it wanted, but all that he could see was the tight line of the man's shoulders. The defeated way that old trench coat hanged from them. He didn't know if the material of that coat could actually age, but it looked as though it had been worn a few too many times, torn apart and stitched back together with whatever mojo Cas could scrounge up.

He looked fragile. Like the growing wind could push him over the edge and send him flying down into the valley behind them, the crevasse that waited patiently to swallow the small body whole.

Dean probably looked just as tired, just a little defeated too. Sam was probably the same, if Dean took the time to truly look at his brother. But they were human. They were supposed to look tired. And weak. Cas was supposed to look different.

In the fading light Cas just looked tired. He just looked human.

The sun set, darkness truly taking hold of the vast, empty void. The spell broken, Cas turned back to his companions, surprised to find that they had forgotten the map that sat between them. They were glancing at his, both looking strange, though in very different ways. Sam continued to stare unabashedly, with something that seemed like awe. It wasn't that look that scared Cas. He was an angel. People had looked at him like that for centuries. It was the look on Dean's face that truly unsettled him. When Cas caught Dean's eyes on him, the man looked away hurriedly. Cas couldn't understand Dean. He was unlike anyone he had ever been in contact with before. Everything about the man seemed it contradict itself.

Sam was still looking, so Castiel looked back. Dean coughed, a low noise probably meant to do little more than attract their attention, but in the silent night the noise carried and magnified.

Without saying anything, Sam and Dean walked back around the car. They must have figured out their destination, Cas guessed. The engine started before h began to move, but he was soon in the car. The road sped under the tyres as Cas watched the horizon for signs of the new day.


End file.
